It would have been nice to have kept the Alabama seat in Republican hands, but the truth is Trump doesn’t need it for now — he’s doing great on his own.

I’d be lying if I said I was pleased about what happened tonight in Alabama. I strongly feel that no Republican candidate should be taken down at the last minute by scurrilous claims based upon long ago memories from women who have shown themselves to be unreliable or even dishonest.

The reality, though, is that the media has been pounding away for weeks (“pedophile, pedophile, pedophile”) and that stuff seeps into people’s brains subliminally. It’s like old commercial jingles. Just being alive in the 1960s and 1970s meant that you could then (and probably still can now) sing a word-perfect rendition of the Oscar Meyer Weiner song.

Thanks to the media, Alabamans were starting to sing, “My candidate is a pedophile,” something that was grossly untrue even if one gave maximum credence to the WaPo’s attack dogs. Even if one assumed solely for the sake of argument that those women had no agenda and were remembering with perfect accuracy events from 40 years ago, the worst facts adduced were that Moore liked teenage girls, which does not pedophile make. That didn’t stop anyone on the Left, though, and apparently affected enough people on the Right.

Here are a couple of other thing to consider is that, while Moore is a stalwart conservative, he’s also a loose cannon. Anything he did that was the least bit . . . um, eccentric, would have been used to tar Trump and Republicans. While it’s true that Trump is successfully beating back the media, his life will be easier if he doesn’t have to deal with a whackadoodle Republican in his train.

The second thing to think about is that, had Moore been elected, the media and the Democrats (as if there’s a difference!) would have used him as a cudgel to drive Trump out on sex scandal grounds. I’ve already explained why I think that’s a ridiculous standard in Trump’s case (the voters knew who he was and elected him anyway) but, again, this deprives Lefties of some ammunition.

That’s the Moore issue. I want to make the rest of this post about Trump. Let me start by repeating Trump’s pitch-perfect congratulations to Doug Jones, along with his cheerful reminder to supporters that the ideological battle is scarcely over:

Congratulations to Doug Jones on a hard fought victory. The write-in votes played a very big factor, but a win is a win. The people of Alabama are great, and the Republicans will have another shot at this seat in a very short period of time. It never ends!

As I see it, Trump has gotten little mileage out of Congress until just a few weeks ago, when the Stupid Party finally got its act together about taxes. Before that, Trump may as well not have had a majority in Congress. Moreover, if tax reform is as good for America and Americans as I think it will be, the elections in November 2018 really will be a whole new ball game for Trump and those Republicans who’ve learned any lessons from his presidency to date. And what would those lessons be?

Trump’s biggest successes as president have had nothing to do with Congress. He’s successful despite it.

An email is making the rounds among my conservative friends in which they share what they think about President Trump. The consensus is that they don’t like the man, but they sure do like what he’s doing. And that’s what I’ll talk about here.

I’ve decided that, unlike my friends, I like Trump quite a lot. I like him because, as Evan Sayet said, “he fights.” McCain and Romney were too “dignified” to fight, so they lost ignominiously. [Read more…]

One of the things that makes us Normals (as Kurt Schlichter so aptly calls Trump supporters) dislike Proggies is the latter’s self-righteousness. They lecture us constantly.

They lecture us about how bad our guns are, even as they live in gated communities and surround themselves with armed guards. They lecture us about climate change, consigning us to crowded buses and to houses that are either punishingly hot or cold, even as they own several supersized houses and jet from one high-end venue to another. They insist on open borders that allow in millions of illiterate, low-skill migrants and refugees, even as they hold professional jobs that immigrants cannot undercut and live in sequestered neighborhoods that allow immigrants in only to clean the house and mow the lawn. They foist socialized medicine on us knowing that, when their own health is at risk, they’ll get the best privatized care.

Moreover, in a way especially relevant to this post, they lecture us on their values: We are evil if we do not support a woman’s unlimited right to commit infanticide. We are evil if we don’t jettison our belief that marriage is a religious covenant intended for one man and one woman. We are evil if we believe that there are two sexes — male and female — rather than the constantly escalating number of gender identities that can change from day to day or even hour to hour. We are evil if we believe that parents should have a say in their children’s lives, rather than allowing schools and government officials to make decisions for our children about sex, gender identity, and goodness knows what else. And of course, we are evil if we believe that America is good and, despite its imperfections, an exceptional nation.

As far as Leftist celebrities are concerned, those of us who disagree with them about matters both social and political are brainless, hate-filled mouth-breathers. They work hard, every single day, to try to control us by subjecting us to maximum government oversight. Only in that way can the world can be turned over to the goodness, light, and tremendous moral sense and compassion that each Leftist celebrity embodies.

I do not intended in this post to offer substantive arguments on any of these issues. Those of you familiar with my blog know that I have addressed all of them at length in past posts. Instead, I want to give you some insight into the values that characterize these people who believe themselves to be our “betters.”

To do that, I’m going to take you back, back, back . . . to 2008. That was the year that 1,900 beautiful people from Hollywood, Washington, D.C., and New York gathered for a friendly, non-televised Matt Lauer celebrity roast. The roast, which The Village Voice wrote about contemporaneously, is in the news today because it was filled with jokes about Matt Lauer’s sexual activities. It therefore proves what we’ve all known about the sex scandal accusations leveled at Leftist men; namely, that everyone knew.

If I were Lauer’s defense counsel, I would argue that these jokes prove nothing beyond the fact that, for whatever reason, Lauer’s sex life was the subject of much joshing amongst his friends. Indeed, they might have made the jokes to highlight that, in a socially liberal environment, he was a prudish model of rectitude who respected his marriage vows. What better way to embarrass someone than to touch upon a subject he likes to leave alone?

But I’m not Matt Lauer’s attorney (thank God) and I’m not interested in whether the jokes prove or disprove that “everyone knew” he was a sexual predator. What I find interesting about the jokes at the roast is the way they reveal the celebrities’ qualities as human beings. It turns out that our holier-than-thou, self-righteous, endlessly hectoring, sensitive, ethically tuned-in “betters” are, in fact, racist, sexist, homophobic, hate-filled, and obscene. Being too near them stains ones soul.

Given that Zarate was a felon with a gun in his hands when he killed Steinle, I’m perplexed he wasn’t convicted for felony murder.

I am as appalled as anyone else that Kate Steinle’s killer, Jose Inez Garcia Zarate, a man who was on his fifth or sixth illegal entry into the United States, walked out of the San Francisco courtroom a free man. I’m also confused, because California has a felony murder law on the books.

As a general rule, you cannot be convicted of murder if you kill someone by accident or even through extreme carelessness. Murder is an intentional act.

The one exception is felony murder. This holds that a person committing a felonious act causes someone’s death, even if the act of killing was accidental, has committed murder. There are wrinkles to the law, with the relevant one in this case being the requirement that the underlying felony has to be inherently dangerous(e.g., grand theft auto or robbery). As this excellent legal analysis shows, a defendant can avoid a felony murder charge by proving that he was not committing an inherently dangerous felony.

In the case of Zarate, he was definitely in a permanently felonious state. That is so because repeatedly entering the U.S. after repeatedly getting deported is a felony. His mere presence was a felony.

Of course, if I were Zarate’s attorney, I would try to blog a felony murder charge by arguing that repeated illegal entry, while felonious, is not inherently dangerous. True, but… [Read more…]

Children’s literature once taught children to avoid danger and be good boys and girls; now it primes young people to accept a Progressive political agenda.

The other night I went to an event at our local independent bookstore. I, along with about thirty other women and a few men, listened to presentations about both children’s and adult’s books as potential holiday gifts.

None of the books were my cup of tea because they were all “quality literature.” Or put another way, they were all the kind of books that would end up in Oprah’s Book Club. My rule of thumb is that I will never read an Oprah-recommended book. Her taste in books and mine are so diametrically opposed that it’s a given that, if she likes it, I’ll hate it.

Oprah likes books that are artsy, meaningful, politically correct, and written in high-brow language. I like thrillers, murder mysteries, romances, and non-fiction. We do not intersect.

Because of my low-brow tastes, had I not gone to this bookstore event, I would have been unaware of the didactic material being pushed as children’s literature for the Progressive, upper-middle-class household.

When I think of didactic children’s literature, I think of fairy tales and books published between 1750 and 1850 or so. Fairy tales may not seem obviously didactic, but they are — or at least some are. Don’t talk to strangers says Little Red Riding Hood. Don’t sleep with “a prick” when you’re still young says Sleeping Beauty. Be a hard worker of good cheer says Cinderella. Don’t accept food from strangers says Snow White. Throughout the world, fairy tales urge girls to be meek and chaste while urging boys to be brave and adventurous. Those aren’t politically correct messages, but history is what it is.

In addition to the didactic fairy-tales, there were others, hundreds of others, that were directed at peasants who gathered around fires on dark nights. They had no purpose but to entertain. They were cruel, rude, licentious, amusing, and frightening. But still, there was always that subset that reinforced society’s messages about sexual roles and safety. Even though the stories weren’t directed specifically at children, the messages were.

Beginning in the late 1700s, publishers began to promote books that were, in fact, directed specifically at children. Many of the writers were religious and, of these religious writers, many subscribed to a fire and brimstone Evangelical Christianity. This was openly didactic children’s literature. In poems and prose, children were warned away from dangerous activities lest horrible things happened (fire, drowning, maiming, poverty, starvation, mad dogs, insane asylums, hangings, you name it), and they were encouraged in good behavior (sitting quietly, obeying their parents, studying their Bible, etc.). These were books of the “teach and preach” variety.

Today, when we look at these books, with their overt threats of punishment and their heavy-handed encouragement for socially- and religiously-acceptable behavior for boys and girls, we tend to laugh . . . and then congratulate ourselves on writing much more subtle, sophisticated, and enjoyable books for children. None of that heavy-handed Christian stuff for our little darlings. Our books teach them to enjoy the world around them, to play well with others, and to love politically correct causes, to admire minorities, and to fear whites. [Read more…]

This Bookworm Beat doesn’t have a huge collection of illustrations but what it has are damn fine. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll laugh some more.

I’ve been paying bills and taxes, and plowing through Hillary’s What Happened? — and I’m really not sure which task is most distasteful. All I do know is that I managed to miss one of Hillary’s best moments in the early chapters of her book. You see, when she started in on literary analysis, my brain said “Academic virtue signaling,” and promptly guided my eyes to the next paragraph. Had I focused harder, I would have caught this gem of totalitarianism:

And while I’m at it, here are two more Hillary gems, followed by several other amusing and insightful posters and cartoons:

With DACA going before Congress, Marin County public schools are abandoning any pretense of political neutrality and are siding with illegal immigration.

Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County

Public schools are supposed to be non-partisan. All residents pay taxes towards these schools and the theory is that in return for this money, the schools teach reading, writing, arithmetic, and other core subjects in a politically neutral manner.

Of course, we all know that this theoretical understanding is a lie. In Blue Counties, science is taught through a filter of anthropogenic climate change; history is taught through a Howard Zinn-esque filter of American hatred; and English, social studies, and other “soft” liberal arts classes aggressively advance a social justice world view.

All of this indoctrination, however, is covert. It’s advanced as pure knowledge that just coincidentally happens to align with Progressive paradigms. With that in mind, school districts — or, at least, school districts in Marin — have stopped short of pitching themselves headlong into a truly partisan political issue. For example, teachers and schools have been mindful to avoid explicitly endorsing a particular candidate.

This simulacrum of non-partisan education in Marin changed with President Trump’s announcement that he was undoing Obama’s unconstitutional DACA power grab and returning it to Congress, where it properly belongs. Reversing a manifestly unconstitutional executive order (“the way our system works, the president doesn’t have the authority to simply ignore Congress and say, we’re not going to enforce the laws that you’ve passed”), was too much for the hard Leftists who populate Marin’s district offices.

Following Donald’s DACA decision, disingenuous Progressives flood Facebook with the misleading claim that “No human being is illegal.”

With President Trump having announced that he is reversing Obama’s illegal DACA order and tossing the matter back to Congress where it properly belongs, my Facebook page is getting filled with variations on this theme:

Sometimes the phrase that “no human being is illegal” is attached to Jorge Ramos, Univision’s propaganda chief, and sometimes to Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor. No matter the source, the point the Progressives are making is clear: It’s immoral to dehumanize people who have invited themselves into this country without permission by calling them “illegal.” To the extent Trump supporters seek to return to their natal lands those who are in this country without permission, we are dehumanizing them and are therefore all Hitler.

This is a singularly dishonest point. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence — which excludes all Progressives and their poor, brainwashed children (the ones who usually haul these signs around at protests — understands that “illegal alien” is a shorthand way to refer to a person who, just by being in this country, is engaged in illegal activity. Thus, the phrase refers to a choice on someone’s part to engage in an illegal activity.

Our prisons are filled with people who make such choices: [Read more…]

I’ve examined all of the evidence carefully and it’s true: What Trump has done — from spying on journalists to unconstitutional treaties — is tyrannical.

Spurred on by my Facebook friends’ assertions that Trump is a dangerous fascist dictator, one who seeks to control all aspects of American life, I examined the evidence — and it’s true. He is. Here are the facts:

1. Trump has been using violence to shut down free speech.

Although he hasn’t activated any branch of the government to shut down free speech, Trump has sent his minions throughout America to quash free speech, especially when people are attempting to the right to free speech to advocate for free speech. We’ve even got the videos to prove it.

Here are Trump’s minions running riot in Berkeley:

And here they are running riot in Portland:

And here they are again in Berkeley:

Wait! Wait. I am so sorry, but my editor has just informed me that those black-clad people are not Trump’s minions. They are, in fact, opposed to Trump.

Never mind. Let’s move on to the next example of Trump’s fascist takeover of America.

2. Trump has spied on the media.

We all know that Trump has had a running feud with the American media, which he has accused of lying rather consistently about him and about other matters important to Americans. As part of this feud, he has actually spied on media figures. Thus, we have this story:

Fox News on Monday angrily denounced the Justice Department’s “downright chilling” decision to target of one of its reporters, James Rosen, in a national security leak investigation. Executive Vice President Michael Clemente portrayed the government’s actions as an assault on “what up until now has always been a free press.”

“We are outraged to learn today that James Rosen was named a criminal co-conspirator for simply doing his job as a reporter,” Clemente said in a statement.

“In fact, it is downright chilling,” Clemente said. “We will unequivocally defend his right to operate as a member of what up until now has always been a free press.”

And this story:

Exactly 10 days ago, President Barack Obama was piously telling reporters who cover him that free speech and an independent press are “essential pillars of our democracy.” On Monday, The Associated Press accused his administration of undermining that very pillar by secretly obtaining two months’ worth of telephone records of AP reporters and editors.

“We regard this action by the Department of Justice as a serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news,” AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder.

Oh, darn it! The editor says I messed up again. Indeed, on second reading, I realize that the last quotation I used actually says it was the Obama administration that was spying on the American media. It seems that the James Rosen spying also occurred during the Obama administration.

I don’t know about you, but spying on the media would seem to me to have a much more chilling effect than publicly scolding them and calling them out, a behavior that sees the media giving (or at least trying to give) as good as it gets. [Read more…]

A book about the heroin crisis in America shows Trump was right when he said that, with illegal aliens, Mexico was not “sending their best” people.

You might recognize the quotation that stands as the title to this post: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.” It comes from a June 2016 speech Trump made about illegal aliens in the United States.

Shortly after saying that Mexico is not sending its “best” people to the U.S., Trump added that, while Mexico was hanging onto its best, it was sending the U.S. a raft of less savory characters, including drug dealers and rapists. Here’s the entire section of the speech in which Trump said that Mexico’s good citizens stay in Mexico, while the miscreants come to America as a new happy hunting ground:

The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.

Thank you. It’s true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They’re sending us not the right people.

While the maddened Progs latched onto the above speech to mean that Trump was a racist bigot who called all Mexicans rapists and drug dealers, I always understood Trump’s statement to mean one thing and one thing only: When a country — say, “County A” — is in charge of its own border, it gets to make choices about immigrants. And when it’s allowed to choose, it chooses immigrants who are upstanding citizens who can and will make solid contributions to their new country.

However, when another country — we’ll call it “Country B” — gets to call the shots about Country A’s immigration policy, the likelihood is that Country B will actively hang onto its productive citizens or actively encourage its less productive ones to head into Country A. Sometimes it will do both.

As I understand things, Trump’s statement was never about race nor was it even about things unique to Mexican culture. What he said, and said correctly in his oblique shorthand, is that America fares very poorly when it hands its immigration policy over to Mexico.

Ann Coulter has already discussed how that Mexican-controlled American immigration policy works when it comes to rapists. The short answer is “not well.” The longer answer is “Mexican illegal aliens commit a disproportionate number of pedophile rapes in America.”

The same can be said for the Mexican-controlled American immigration policy when it comes to illegal drugs. Things do not work out well for Americans.

Pardon my meandering style, but I think it’s helpful to give a little back story here, if only to prove the bona fides of the book I’m going to discuss in this post. My interest in this subject started a couple of weeks ago, after I watched an HBO documentary about opioid use in America. I wrote a post generally praising the documentary for showing what a scourge heroin and other opiate addiction is for those who have to live with or care for the addict, but adding that I found some of its unsupported statements suspect. [Read more…]

Even if the MSM isn’t lying about the facts, it’s still purveying fake news because its Leftist values permeate everything from story placement to language.

PragerU is back with another of its excellent videos, this time about fake news. In it, Andrew Klavan offers his three-point rule of thumb for identifying the fake news that constantly spills from the mainstream media.

He makes an important point about fake news, which is that it’s not always about fake facts, which only occur some of the time. Instead, the real issue is that all of the time, every single time, the overwhelmingly Progressive atmosphere in which the mainstream media exists leaves reporters unable to avoid serious confirmation bias. This confirmation bias leads them to impose values on the facts, and these values are invariably hostile to conservatives and supportive of Progressives, no matter how badly those Progressives behave.

I agree with everything Klavan says. However, after you’ve watched the video, I’ll add one more thing I think he missed:

What Klavan missed is that there is a type of fake news that the media consistently uses that goes beyond what he identified. Klavan identified two primary tactics: (1) assigning relative values to stories (e.g., front or back page status) and (2) using emotionally colored adjectives (e.g., calling Tea Partiers racists or Occupy people heroes). [Read more…]

I like some of Charles Krauthammer’s ideas about slowing the influx of illegal aliens into America, but he’s wrong to give amnesty to those already here.

Charles Krauthammer has a good video out through Prager University about ways to deal with illegal aliens. He talks about the virtues of building a wall and about using e-Verify to keep immigrants from working.

Otherwise, though, he thinks it’s fine to let the existing 11 million illegal aliens stay here. I don’t. And I don’t care if they’ve been here decades. You pays your money and you takes your chances — and in this case, you came illegally and therefore there was always the risk you’d be kicked out.

Because of the blind eye Krauthammer is willing to turn on the 11 million illegal aliens already here, he neglects something very important we need to do, which is deny anyone here illegally any form of social services: welfare payments, food stamps, housing, free education, you name it. As to that last, do keep in mind that in California, illegal aliens get better deals on tuition than legal in-state students.

Even if we build the wall, as long as we have these honey pot entitlements, illegal aliens will still come. Their willingness to come is especially predictable because they know that we’re not the East Germans and we won’t shoot them if we catch them crossing the border despite the wall.

The Fourth Circuit held that a president’s reputation for honesty has to be read into his official acts. If only that rule were retroactive to Obamacare.

Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that I haven’t comment on the latest atrocity from the Fourth Circuit, in the form of a decision striking down Trump’s executive order limiting new immigration from countries harboring terrorists — countries that, not coincidentally, are Muslim majority. That same order, it should be noted, targeted only six countries, leaving untouched most of the world’s Muslim majority countries.

Although the decision is long, it can be summed up in a single sentence that the Fourth Circuit included to describe its take on “an Executive Order that in text speaks with vague words of national security, but in context drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination.” In other words, the order itself meets Constitutional standards; the Court rejects it because it comes from Trump.

Since I blog for pleasure not money, I most certainly do not get paid enough to slog through a constitutionally infirm, badly reasoned political hit piece from an ostensibly “neutral” federal court. I therefore left the legal analyses to better thinkers than I ever will be; e.g., Hans von Spakovsky, >David Rivkin and Lee Casey, Paul Mirengoff, and John Hinderaker.

The only reason I mention that misbegotten excuse for legal reasoning is because of a Washington Post article about Trump’s defeat at the hands of the Fourth Circuit. You don’t even have to read the article to get the point. Here’s the Facebook link the WaPo put up to promote its article: [Read more…]